Chronic CO Poisoning:

Residual Effects:

This is a "theoretical" piece, made intentionally vague in detail, and designed to consider the ways in which the residual effects of acute and chronic CO exposure develop.

The main thesis in this construct is that damage begins to develop immediately with both acute and with chronic CO exposure. Damage is manifest when CO exposure ends with both forms. With chronic CO however, exposure lasts so long that symptoms expressed by victims are usually a combination of acute symptoms (those seen in the main during very brief acute exposures) and increasingly with duration of exposure, residual symptoms caused by longterm damage (eg. neurocognitive, behavioral). Thus, in chronic CO exposure, common physical symptoms (eg. headache, nausea, dizziness) many times fail to disappear during intervals of non-exposure after some period of CO exposure, blurring the effect of site specific and temporal relationships to CO exposure, which are often said to be important clues to the fact of CO poisoning itself.